The first punch missed the practice dummy by two inches.
Riku pulled back, reset, threw it again. Better. His fist connected with the padded surface and the dummy rocked on its base. The impact ran up his arm and he felt it in his elbow, his shoulder, places that shouldn't have been complaining about a basic straight right. Three days ago he'd have put a dent in the thing. Today it rocked and settled back like he'd given it a friendly shove.
Three days without feeding. His body was letting him know.
The park was empty at five in the morning, which was why he used it. A strip of grass between two apartment blocks with a rusted playground at one end and a row of practice dummies the city had installed during the quirk fitness initiative that nobody used anymore. The dummies were beat to hell. Somebody had drawn a face on one of them with a marker. Riku had been hitting that one specifically because the expression looked smug.
He ran through the combination again. Jab, cross, hook to the body. Close the distance and get his hands on the target. Simulate a drain. His whole fighting style was built around contact. Every technique he'd developed over the last five years was designed to get him close enough to touch someone, because touching was where his quirk lived. Ranged fighters were his nightmare. Grapplers were his best friends. He'd spent hundreds of hours on clinch work, on dirty boxing, on ugly close-range fighting that would never win style points but kept his hands on the other person's skin.
The hook landed clean. He followed it with a knee to the dummy's midsection and grabbed its shoulders, holding the contact for a three-count. In a real fight, three seconds of skin contact was enough to drain a normal person down to wobbly knees. Against someone with a strong quirk, it bought him a stat boost and bought them a headache.
He let go and stepped back. His breathing was heavier than it should have been.
That was the problem. The feeding thing wasn't just about sex, although sex was the most efficient route. It was about vitality. His quirk burned through stored energy the way a car burned through gas, and the tank was getting low. He could feel it in specific places now. His calves were tighter than usual and his right shoulder ached from a training session two days ago that should have healed overnight. His reaction time was off too, a half-beat slow. In a classroom, nobody would notice. In a fight, that half-beat was where people died.
He dropped into a sprint and headed for the alleys.
The back alleys behind the shopping district were his parkour route. Narrow, cluttered, full of fire escapes and dumpsters and walls at good angles for vaults. He'd mapped it out his first week in the apartment and had been running it every morning since. Left at the ramen shop, over the fence behind the dry cleaner, up the dumpster and onto the low roof of the storage building, across the gap to the next building. His feet hit the gravel roof and he rolled, came up, kept moving.
Slower than last week. He could feel the difference. The gap between the storage building and the next one was maybe two meters and he'd been clearing it without thinking for months. Today his lead foot hit the edge and he had to windmill his arms to keep from going backward. His heart hammered and he stood on the roof for a second, looking down at the four-meter drop into an alley full of recycling bins.
Would've been a stupid way to get hurt.
He kept going but took the rest of the route at three-quarter speed. Down the fire escape on the far side, through the parking lot, back to the park from the south entrance. The whole circuit took fourteen minutes. His best time was eleven. Three minutes was a lot.
Back at the dummies, he sat on the ground and drank water from a bottle that was warm and tasted like plastic. His shirt was soaked through. He could smell his own sweat and underneath it, the pheromone sweetness that leaked worse when he was tired. If anyone walked through the park right now they'd feel it. A warm tug in their chest, a sudden urge to sit down next to the sweaty kid on the grass and ask him if he was okay. Maybe touch his arm while they asked.
He needed to feed. The math was getting hard to argue with.
The problem was logistics. He was fifteen. His options for intimate contact were limited by age and circumstance and the fact that he lived alone in an apartment building full of adults who didn't need a teenage incubus complicating their Tuesday. The girl from 3B was an option he'd been deliberately avoiding because she was twenty-three and tipsy every time she showed up at his door, and because he didn't want his first real drain to be with someone who'd feel weird about it in the morning.
Riku had standards. They were flexible standards, but they existed.
He drank more water and thought about it practically. Two and a half weeks until the entrance exam. If he didn't feed before then, he'd walk into UA running on fumes. His physical stats would be baseline at best, maybe below. He could still pass the exam on technique and intelligence alone, probably. The faux villains were robots. Charm Pulse didn't work on robots. But he'd score lower than he should, and scoring low meant less room for error, and less room for error meant depending on luck instead of skill.
He didn't like depending on luck. Luck was for people who hadn't read the manga.
The sun was coming up over the apartment blocks. Orange light across the rooftops. His body was cooling down and the aches were settling in, especially the shoulder and a new one in his lower back from the parkour route.
A woman jogged past the park entrance. Mid-thirties, headphones in, didn't look his way. His aura brushed her as she passed and she slowed down for a step, turned her head slightly in his direction, then kept going. He watched her ponytail swing around the corner and thought about nothing in particular.
Surrounded by people every day and unable to touch any of them in the way his body actually needed. The irony of an incubus quirk in a world where heroes were supposed to be role models and sex was something that happened behind closed doors and everyone pretended it didn't. His quirk registration listed him as Emitter/Transformation Hybrid, which was technically accurate and practically useless. The doctor who'd classified him at age four had written "Incubus-type" in the notes section and then looked at Riku's mother like she'd done something wrong.
He'd been dealing with that look his whole life. Teachers and counselors gave it to him. The quirk specialist who suggested "suppressant therapy" gave it to him while handing his mother a pamphlet. He'd said no. The pheromones were part of the package and the package was what made him dangerous in a fight. Suppress the quirk and he was just a kid with decent reflexes. Keep the quirk and he was someone who could walk into a room full of villains and have half of them forget why they were fighting before the first punch landed.
Riku stood up. His knees popped. That was new.
He went back to the dummies and worked combinations for another twenty minutes. Slower, more technical. Focused on form instead of power because the power wasn't there right now. Jab. Cross. Slip left, counter. Step in, grab, hold the contact. Release. Reset.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it for two more combinations, then checked.
A news alert. "Pro Hero Mount Lady Confirmed for Tatooin Station Community Event, Friday." There was a photo attached. Yu Takeyama in civilian clothes at some press thing, smiling wide, hair perfect. A smile that sold magazines and made people forget she could step on a building.
Friday. That was five days from now.
He put the phone away and hit the dummy again. Harder this time. The smug marker face stared back at him and he gave it a right hook that actually moved it. Good. Not great, but good.
The thing about having meta-knowledge was that it didn't make you powerful. It made you prepared. He knew Mount Lady's real name, her quirk specifications, her personality, her insecurities. He knew Midnight's teaching schedule and the specific way her Somnambulist quirk interacted with pheromone emitters. He knew that Momo Yaoyorozu would be in Class 1-A and that Mina Ashido's acid production spiked with her emotional state. Tsuyu Asui was the most perceptive person in the room at any given time.
None of it mattered if he showed up to UA looking like he hadn't slept in a month.
He finished his training and walked home. The sun was full up now and the sidewalks were filling with the morning rush. Nobody in this city knew how much trouble was coming. He kept his aura pulled tight and his head down. A salary-man bumped his shoulder on the sidewalk and jerked like he'd touched a live wire, then looked confused and kept walking.
"Sorry," Riku muttered to nobody.
Back at the apartment, he showered and stood under the water longer than he needed to. The warm water helped with the aches but didn't fix them. His body wanted what it wanted and hot water wasn't a substitute.
He got out and toweled off. Checked his reflection. The face was still good. He looked tired, though. Shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there last week. The quirk-enhanced handsomeness only went so far when the engine underneath was running on empty.
He made rice in the cooker and ate it with an egg and some leftover pickles that might have been past their date. The meal was functional. His body processed it and asked for more. It always asked for more when the real reserves were low, like it was trying to compensate with calories for what it actually needed. He ate a second egg and it didn't help.
The TV was on in the background. Some morning show with two hosts who smiled too much. He wasn't watching.
He was thinking about the plan. It hadn't changed much in the last year.
Mount Lady first. The community event on Friday was close enough to her canon debut timing that the story was probably tracking the same beats. She'd be there. He'd be there. The aura would do the initial work and then it was on him. No manipulation, no quirk tricks. Just be the one person who treated her like a person instead of a spectacle. That was the approach. Simple, honest, and it worked because it was actually true. He didn't want to worship her. He wanted to fuck her. The distinction mattered more than people thought.
After Mount Lady, Midnight. The timeline on that one was trickier because she was faculty and he was a student and a wrong move there could blow up his entire UA career. But her quirk would react to his before either of them made a conscious choice about it. Pheromone-types recognized each other. The pull would be there from the first time they were in the same room. What happened after that depended on how honest they were both willing to be.
And then UA itself. Momo, Mina, Tsuyu. Girls he'd known about for years in a way none of them would ever understand. He had to be careful with that. Meta-knowledge was an advantage but it was also a kind of lie. He knew things about them that he shouldn't know. Private things, future things, the shape of their arcs before they'd lived them. Using that knowledge to get close was fine. Using it to pretend he was something he wasn't would make him exactly what his quirk was designed to produce, and he refused to be that guy.
He wanted multiple women. He was wired for it, literally, his quirk functioned better with multiple bonded partners. But every single one of them had to choose it and want it. Walk into it knowing what he was and what the arrangement looked like. The moment anyone felt trapped or obligated, the whole thing fell apart. On every level. Quirk Resonance didn't activate through coercion. The bond had to be real or the power didn't come.
Convenient, that. The universe had built a lie detector into his dick.
Riku snorted and turned off the TV. He should do homework. He was still technically enrolled in a regular school until UA started and he'd been blowing off assignments for a week. The teachers had stopped caring once he'd announced he was taking the hero exam. Another incubus-type kid reaching above his station. They'd see.
He pulled out a textbook and stared at a math problem about trains leaving stations at different times. His vision blurred. The fatigue was getting worse. His body was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with how much sleep he'd gotten.
Five days until the community event. Five days until Mount Lady.